Nearly 1m Xbox Live Gamertags will be cleared for sale tomorrow

Gamertags associated with long-forgotten Xbox Live accounts will be offered for sale tomorrow.

One million of them, which have been sourced from original Xbox accounts that never migrated over to the Xbox 360, will on May 18th be available to those who have had an active Xbox Live subscription for a cumulative period of at least one year.

The actual list of available tags hasn’t been published, although apparently many are linked to a small group of categories – names, pop culture references, food, geography, science and tech, numbers, animals and inventions.

Microsoft will release the mysterious list of tags over the period of 24 hours, so as not to put folk on conflicting sides of the planet at an advantage or disadvantage. Xbox 360 customers won’t be able to make the switch via their consoles and instead will have to do it on Xbox.com, through the Windows 10 Xbox app or via an Xbox One.

Changing your Gamertag ain’t free, of course. It currently costs 6.80. New users who are assigned a random tag when signing up are able to change to one of their choice for free upon setup.